1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to digital camera technology and also relates more particularly to a system and method for correlating processing data and image data within a digital camera device.
2. Description of the Background Art
An important digital still-camera performance feature is the number of captured images that can be stored in the camera's finite memory. To maximize the image-carrying capacity of digital still-cameras, it is desirable to compress the images prior to storage. Conventional digital cameras typically perform image processing on the captured raw image data and then use a high-quality image compression routine (such as JPEG) to compress the image data.
Furthermore, digital cameras may frequently be required to capture and concurrently process multiple successive sets of captured image data. Each captured image, however, has important related information which may be needed during the image processing and compression operations, as well as subsequently. Examples of such processing and compression data might include camera settings (e.g., focus, aperture, and white-balance information), time and date of image capture and image processing parameters.
Each captured image potentially has a different set of relevant processing information. Therefore, each captured image within a digital camera may require a separate and unique set of processing data. Furthermore, to permit effective access to these unique sets of processing and compression data, each of the sets of captured image data and the corresponding processing data must be linked together. Efficient access to the processing data at the appropriate time is thus an important feature of modern digital cameras. Therefore, what is needed is an improved system and method for correlating processing data and image data within a digital camera device.